On 29/04/18 03:56 PM, Dave Howorth wrote:
Fortunately I don't usually try to do anything ambitious with the program any longer, so I'm not often looking for help.
There were, in the early days of MS-DOS, some damn fine office-grade word processors. I'm sure some of the Greybeards here have fond memories.
From a more objective POV, as far as office efficiency went, this probably climaxed with DOD3.3 and Wordperfect4.2. Mosy of the 'secretaries' preferred WordPerfect to MS-Word. Perhaps the latter's 'style sheets' were more ... sensible ... but those of us who grew up with VI/EMACS and ROFF/TROFF weren't enamoured with the WYSIWYG anyway.
My observation at the time was so long as Microsoft threw advertising dollars that way, MS-Word sales dominated. But magazine reviewers are fickle. Microsoft added 'features' and turned the _word_ processor into a document processor, subsuming functions that had nothing to do with with the basic from office/secretarial and taking in the work of the "Art Department": produce brochures and newsletters and even, *shock* *horror*, books! So it became a 'feature war' and he who has the longest bullet list wins. We saw that in the AV wars as well. Never mind that boot sector viruses went out with booting from 8" floppies, they were still on the lists! Never mind that 95% of the people using MS-Word don't use 98% of it's features. And the issue with OpenOffice and LibreOffice was that in order to show that Linux has an office suite every bit as good as Microsoft it became a bullet list war. Not a 'productivity' war. In fact the Linux side won a few points, like having a UI that was a bit retrograde but the one people preferred, and had consistent indenting, which was a big hit for producing military-style documentation. But we are still back to the 95%/98% issue. My biggest issue is that I want to print pocketable 'prompt cards': 5x3 things with title and bullet lists of reminders and perhaps little graphics. Setting page size is no problem; fonts and layout and all the rest is no problem. Persuading my printer to accept 5x3 cards via the manual feed is the problem. The presence or absence of LO help files has no relevance to this. -- A: Yes. > Q: Are you sure? >> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. >>> Q: Why is top posting frowned upon? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org